New 3D Drivers for AmigaOS 4.1: Warp3D for Southern Islands Graphics Cards
A-EON Technology Ltd is pleased to announce that the first release candidate of
RadeonHD Southern Islands Warp3D driver is now available to purchase and download from
AMIStore App Store.
Following our acquisition of the joint ownership of Warp3D, to complement our ongoing work with the driver for the Evergreen RadeonHD graphics card series, we commissioned AmigaOS graphics specialist Hans de Ruiter to create a Warp3D driver for the newer Southern Islands chipsets.
PDF News Release (click here)
At the heart of the new Southern Island Warp3D driver is the W3D_SI.library which provides 3D graphics acceleration for selected Radeon HD 7xxx and Radeon Rx series graphics cards which include the Southern Islands Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The driver has already gone through several iterations and has been put through its paces by a core group of dedicated AmigaOS 4 beta testers.
Warp3D-SI Features:* Supports larger textures (up to 16384x16384 memory permitting).
* Performance is less dependent on resolution than previous drivers, including rendering at HD resolutions.
* Submits vertices to the GPU via vertex buffers rather than directly in the command stream (one of the bottlenecks of the old Radeon drivers).
* Uses the RadeonHD_RM.resource for VRAM allocation, providing more efficient memory management than own system.
* Accumulates small vertex arrays into larger buffers to provide faster performance where lots of tiny render operations are performed
* Doesn't lock the entire graphics system between
3D_LockHardware() / W3D_UnlockHardware(), so an
application or game crash is less likely to freeze the entire system
To complement the development Hans de Ruiter has also updated MiniGL and at the time of writing version 2.20 was ready for release on Warp3D.
New updated RadeonHD drivers are also being released to coincide with the update. Registered owners can
now download the new versions of 1.4 and 2.7 from AMIstore.
Warp3D RadeonHD Southern Islands Requirements:
An AmigaONE or AmigaOS 4.1 compatible computer with:-
* AmigaOS 4.1 “Final Edition”
* RadeonHD V1.4 or V2.7
* MiniGL - version 2.20 or later
Containing one of the following RadeonHD or Radeon Rx Southern Island graphics cards:
* Radeon HD 7750-7970 series graphics card (excluding the Radeon HD 7790)
* Radeon R7 250X/265 (excluding R7 250)
* Radeon R9 270/270X/280/280X
This version is the first Release Candidate (version 1.9).
With this release A-EON is once again pleased to re-affirm our commitment to providing new and progressive software for AmigaOS and towards our customers.
We would like to thank Hans De Ruiter for his work on this release.
A-EON Technology Ltd
www.a-eon.com
